One issue that I think has not been given sufficient attention within the Christian community is the problem of natural evil. I have made my own attempt at responding to the various proposed approaches to this very ancient question in a recent essay “And God saw that it was good: Death and pain in the created order” published in the ASA journal — Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Volume 63, Number 2 (June 2011).

Great personal story. I think I’m coming around to agreeing with you that if God is real that he wouldn’t crush us with evidence of himself (like your GOD IS REAL example), but would make himself real personally through the life of the individual (like in your story). But this also makes it very anecdotal, and as any late night TV watcher know anecdotal evidence isn’t always reliable.

I also liked your idea of adding stories at the back of bibles. It is interesting hearing the stories of others and how everyone has their own interesting life story.

- Mark

Was thinking of you the other day as I had another “faith journey” epiphany, with the help of a dear friend. I know this post doesn’t belong in the same post as your BarlowGirl song, but thought I’d put it here, because I didn’t know where else to put it. Please feel free to remove if you feel it does not fit.

Anyway, I have struggled with my faith for a couple years now and I believe I’ve shared some of my struggles with you (in the past). I was getting somewhat close to abandoning my “religion” (not my faith), but that also was a scary prospect for me. For me, it was kind-a coming down to a Deist sort of belief. In other words, I am OK with a belief in the supernatural as I feel that the nature of reality (from what little I know of it) seems to be so unbelievably awesome that I have a hard time saying that there is nothing else “out there”. As Fred Hoyle said, “the universe is a put-up job”.

So, with that said, it seems that lately, I’ve had more and more of a problem with the bible and the prospect of a “personal God”. Enter my friend….. I was telling him the story of something that happened to me at one point in my faith journey with Christ. Please bare with me as I recall the story (in short form).

Basically, I was trying to day-trade and thought (after several months) that I could beat the pants off of the market and I successfully convinced my wife to take out a $50K home equity loan. I traded for a month or so and made a decent amount of money, but on one fateful day, I ended up blowing so much money (in the span of about 2 hours) that I lost $26K out of my original $50K. Dude, I can’t explain how I felt. It was a hellish, crushing, empty feeling and I felt like dying. All of this was compounded by the fact that I didn’t tell my wife that this extension of my home equity loan was actually going to be used for day trading.

I went home that night and “acted normal”. But a little while into bed time, I sat up and started to tell her of my horrific betrayal. It was a horrible next several months. I had to hire a financial planner and had to disclose the information to him as well as a few other people in our lives (all conditions imposed by my wife).

Anyway, time went on. The episode was not forgotten and I slowly started studying the financial markets again. After a couple years, I started trading again. This time (I thought) more conservatively. I traded this new way (writing naked put options, in case you are interested) for about 3 years and towards the end of that three year period, I started slowly loosing money month after month. After 3 months of loosing money, I decided to call it quits. I had a nice 3 year run (didn’t make a ton of money, but I did OK).

Now, after the run ended, I was somewhat suspicious of the amount of money that I had made during that 3 year stint, so I decided to break out my ScottTrade statements and tally things up. To my utter and complete amazement (even including the final losses from the end of the 3 year period), I had made $26K. The numbers weren’t exact, but I think the difference was around $70 bucks from how much I lost on that fateful day a few years earlier and how much I had steadily made back over the course of 3 years trading naked puts.

When I’ve told this story to others, I often feel like they may think that the money is the central point, but in actuality, it’s really a very small part of the picture. The two things that really hit home for me are that the numbers were so friggin’ close (between what I lost and subsequently gained) and the fact that what was once lost, was now totally and completely restored. Also, in hindsight, naked put writing is extremely risky (especially doing it the way I was doing it). I thought I was being intelligent, but I was not. For this, I should be slapped in the face, but for whatever reason, I had the where-with-all to stop trading this type of methodology for good (this was back in 2003) when I saw that it was no longer making money.

Lastly, I am a numbers guy (dual major in Comp Sci and Math for my undergrad and MS in Comp Sci for my Graduate work). So, needless to say, this whole thing spoke to me in a way that was so utterly and completely personal that it’s difficult for me to explain. Even to this day, I can remember the sense of awe that I felt as I went back and reviewed my old statements.

There were many other things that came out of this story, but these are the highlights…..

The reason I echo this story is because I feel that this was God somehow, some way, working in my life. I’m not saying that he “took money out of other’s hands to purposely give me money”!!!! But rather, I believe he somehow noodled with material reality and finagled things such that this happened (over the course of 3 years, with several million market participants). Was this complete and total coincidence? In the depth of my soul, I really don’t believe it was. The way this series of events unraveled and spoke to me, during this phase of my life was just indescribable.

So, after speaking to my friend the other night and batting all of this around, this is the way I’m starting to look at things…. Being that I do have a core belief (albeit, fairly small) that there is a possibility that some sort of God created this whole thing, I could label myself a Deist. However, that crazy event that I just described above, means (to me) also that God must somehow be deeply and intimately personal.

I figure, if this is true (that God is deeply and intimately personal), then my experience (and the billions of others on the planet that claim the same type of ridiculous, anecdotal experiences) is exactly what I’d expect to see. In other words, these stories can actually be seen as a very impressive mountain of evidence to support the notion that God may be a personal God after all… If this were really the case, then I suppose I wouldn’t expect to see PI somehow encoded within the pages of scripture to the 1000th decimal point. Or I wouldn’t expect to see stars (in the Milky Way Galaxy) spell out the words “GOD IS REAL”, for a stretch of 30 million years (all the while being perfectly visible from planet Earth)… Nope, no grand display to all of humanity, but rather individual stories of hearts changed, all stacked up one after the other. So utterly weird, but also, such a potentially beautiful and joyous state of affairs.

Lastly…. What about the bible? Well, I think there is much of it that is just dead wrong. Same with many Christians that I know. I find myself cringing when I see people waving the bible around saying things like “the answers are all here” or “everything you need to know is in this book”. Just makes my skin crawl….. I think of Jesus walking around with his friends in the 1st century (without a thought at all of the 27 letters and writings that would later come to be included in the New Testament cannon). But then, what’s to say about the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter or some of the Catholic books that have been forever canonized into their bibles? What about other writings (or personal letters) that were lost or not canonized?

My feeling is that each and every one of our stories should be included as part of “God’s Story” and we should simply staple our stories at the back of our bibles (and perhaps tear a few pages or books out while we’re at it. Perhaps tack my wife’s story in there as well. Then, friends, relatives, enemies and people I’ve never known…… I say “to hell with Christianity”, but I still think somehow, some way, Christ has got the goods. Not the bible, but Christ!

Jason

1) Most Christians belong to churches that do not interpret the account of creation so literally. It has not undermined out faith.
2) The idea that a literal acceptance of Genesis is required of Christians is a relatively new one. St Augustine appears to have caused no controversy with his “Literal Interpretation of Genesis” in which his “literal interpretation” so widely that the people you are quoting would regard it as a metaphorical interpretation. His earlier rejection of a literal interpretation was also AFAIK uncontroversial at the time (1600 years ago!).

It is sad to see people being driven away from the faith because of a problem that does not lie with the fundamentals of Christianity, but only with particular Christian theologies that some people cannot let go off.

http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/Keller_white_paper.pdf

John,
The conference was very good. I got to meet many people who held to the important fundamentals, and let science take them where it took them. It was refreshing and made me hopeful.

Jeremy,
Thanks for the article link. I’ll have to digest that one in time.